There have been a lot of mainstream media reports lately about programmes, usually from fundamentalist Christians, promoting sexual abstinence among young people. Aside from the fact that some of these programmes are downright loopy (and many are overtly sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., etc.), the one thing they all have in common is their small numbers.
So why is the mainstream news media tripping all over themselves to promote these groups, despite knowing that according to the best studies to date, 90% of young adults who make an abstinence pledge will break it? Some of it is the typical pack mentality laziness of the mainstream news media, reporting what each other reports. Part of it, too, is that it’s easy: They can talk to a few people and file the story without having to do any actual journalism.
The AP reported on students at Harvard who have formed an abstinence group:
The group, created earlier this school year, has more than 90 members on its Facebook.com page and drew about half that many to an ice cream social.
Having 90 people on a Facebook page doesn’t mean they’re all students, but even if they are, 90 out of 6,700 undergraduates is hardly a mass movement. Couldn’t it be the media might be again blowing things just a little bit out of proportion?
However, it’s worth noting that it’s not all bad: The fundamentalists who promote these groups are providing an unintentional pubic service to lesbian and gay America. By providing an environment in which people are expected to not have sex, it creates a cover for closeted gay and lesbian youth who don’t want to have sex with the other gender, anyway. Membership in these groups provides these closeted lesbian and gay youths, especially those from intolerant, homophobic fundamentalist families, with a socially-acceptable way to avoid intimacy with the opposite sex and to do so without raising suspicion.
Sure, the motivation behind these groups is suspect, their politics reprehensible, but by promoting these groups they nevertheless may help to make life for deeply closeted gay and lesbian youth just a little bit easier, allowing them to survive until they can get out on their own and away from the oppression.
The job of society in general is to be there to help these people—gay and non-gay alike—once they emerge on the other side of chastity groups. That’s something the fundamentalists can’t and won’t do. Seems to me there’s a story in that.
4 comments:
Here is something I found intresting. Besides South Korea and Japan (which are cultutally very different) the country which as the lowest teen pregency rate in the developed world is the Netherlands. The Netherlands generally has a rather more open attitude towards sex. What is even more intresting is that this is not because teens are having tonnes of sex but taking precautions. The Dutch also tend to have sex later than many nations in the west (as well as having a lower rate STD infections and abortions). The USA is, along with much of the 'Anglo-Saxon' world at the wrong end of these surveys.
Sex is something that is hard wired into us, it cant be ignored...teens will figure it out, but by trying to hide it and control it, you lose control. It seems that by educating teens, talking about it in the open, giving people control over thier own lives, and de-mystifying it, the Dutch among others, have construcuted a more healthy environment.
I guess the problem is that by empowering people it means dis-empowering the already empowered, the Church. If you look at all religous insitutions, they are all hung up about sex, women and gays in particular as they undermine there power. You control people in the bedroom, you control all aspects of thier lifes....even if that means misleading them and destroying their lives!
I didn't know that abut The Netherlands, EE, but it makes perfect sense.
I can remember my mother talking about alcohol in America. She said the US encourages alcohol abuse among the young by holding it out as something absolutely forbidden until adulthood. That could be what happens with sex--keeping it forbidden until adulthood makes young people want it all the more (although, in the case of sex, hormones may help encourage activity). As you say, this suppression effort means a loss of control.
I also agree with you about organised religion trying to control the bedroom as a means for controlling all aspects of people's lives (all organised religion does this to some extent, some worse than others, and fundamentalists of every description being the worst).
What bothers me most about these chastity programmes is that they promote an inherently misogynistic and homophobic view: It's anti-women because they're forbidden to control their own sexuality (handing it first to their fathers, then their husbands). Gay and lesbian people can never marry each other in most places, so they will never be able to have sex within the context of a marriage--the one permitted expression of sexuality. So heterosexual males make all the decisions about when sex can take place and with whom. This is probably a topic in itself, but I think it's important to recognise that when religion is trying to control sexuality, who it is, exactly, who gets to exercise that control.
I've been watching some greats shows on Frenc gay tv -- Pink -- on the aids crisis. The timing is related to the Sidaction, going on now -- France's Telethon for aids charities.
One showed Bush finally agreeing to aids funding, once Billy Graham's son -- who had been a missionary in Africa -- got the Christians behind it -- and Bono somehow had got Jesse Helms behind it, too.
The ludicrous thing was, so much of the money had to be spent on abstinence efforts. An intelligent African woman made comments about how abstinence wasn't always possible ....
You're right, LiF, and I didn't think about that aspect. Much of the US government's funding for AIDS prevention goes to promotion of abstinence-only programmes which promote abstinence as the only way to avoid HIV infection and don't teach anything at all about safer sex. It also doesn't give money to UN agencies because, the Republicans allege, the UN funds abortions (although simply providing safe sex information is reason enough to incur the wrath of America's "Christian" right).
One of the larger issues here is how much money the Bush regime has thrown away on "faith-based initiatives", thinly disguised programmes for transferring taxpayer money to right wing christian organisations.
I can't wait until this long nightmare is over...
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